In the Limelight - 'The Hundred Dresses'

By Graham Dixon

Published 4:36 am, Friday, October 28, 2011

Plays that explore ideas rather than people have a difficult road to hoe. They can become mired in abstraction rather than realism, and the characters may stray dangerously near to being vehicles for the expression of a particular viewpoint rather than flesh-and-blood people the audience cares about. These traps can be particularly prominent if a play has a specific ‘message’ — such as the “bullying is wrong” message that permeates the Pickwick Players adaptation of “The Hundred Dresses.” But Bill Williams managed to make his characters simultaneously believable and representatives of type. The show was poignant without being maudlin, carried a virtuous message without straying too often into preaching.

Unlike the surreal splendors of many Pickwick productions, “The Hundred Dresses” tells a relatively simple story of school bullying, quietly poisonous racism and a life devoted to kindness after a childhood mistake. As the adult Maddie, Alex Speight takes on the difficult role of a grown woman who is looking back on the defining moment of her life. The opening scene, as she touches her teacher’s desk and then moves to the one she once sat in as a child, was beautifully blocked.

Having just four school-age characters distilled the often labyrinthine nature of school friendships, jealousies and hatreds into discrete, unavoidable types. Thus there was the pretty, vicious bully Peggy — played Friday night by Darian Butler. This character hones in on a potential victim with a shark-like precision — and when she tastes blood in the water, such as in the Halloween scene — she goes in for the kill. Butler was brilliantly nasty here — the scene was uncomfortable to watch for the best reasons. There is a little of Peggy in all of us.

But the one thing a bully needs above anything else is a chorus of supporters — they rarely work alone. Hattie Miller played Maddie — the girl torn between what she knows to be right and what is expedient — with just the right measure of inner conflict. She knew the bullying was wrong, but the desire to be liked won out for most of the story.

The most energetic and naturally skilled actor on the stage was Patton Small. Playing the irresistibly goofy Tommy — the boy who loves shark photos as much as he fantasizes about being the greatest-baseball-pitcher-ever — Small showed, in the largest sense, that all it takes for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing. Like Maddie, he takes the path of least resistance at one vital moment.

Savannah Cantwell played the bullied girl Wanda when I saw the show. She inhabited the terrible awkwardness of a girl whose father is so poor she has to wear the same dress every day. Yet at the same time her stores of knowledge and inner strength were believable. Cantwell played contradiction well — one of the marks of mature acting.

As the long-suffering teacher Mr. Mason, Bobby Haley characterized all the enthusiasm that goes along with that profession. The Halloween day scene in the classroom was very funny, and Bill Williams neatly showed how adults as well as children want to be liked, and how they hide secret dreams that will never be fulfilled.

Connor Franks played the pivotal role of Jan, a modest and unassuming Polish immigrant who is trying to make his way in America. But he has strong depths, such as when he openly takes on casually accepted racism as he puts Peggy in her place.

The ending of “The Hundred Dresses” was a little too neatly packaged as a morality tale. While the transformations in attitude that Maddie and Tommy display are credible — after all they were just followers swaying whichever way the wind blew, that of Peggy was less so. Butler did a good job, but the sea-change from bully to friend in the script was too tsunamic. People — even children — do not tend to stray too far from their natural propensities, and the sadistic bully is surely born rather than developed. It is difficult to change what we essentially are. It would be nice if bullies could see the error of their ways as Peggy does, but in real life that rarely happens. The bullying is — as the scorpion says to the frog in that famous allegory — just in their nature.